Live data from Hacker News

Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

241–250 of 790 posts

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#241

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah for…

Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-wh... ). They're also a lot faster and have less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots, though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a lo…

There’s some kind of problem with Discord’s privacy history (either country of ownership, or founder) that makes it unsuitable for a lot of firms.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#242
Seeing this, and then seeing Heroku cut its free plan…isn’t this just Salesforce dictating the future of the companies they acquire? Salesforce is traditionally an incredibly expensive platform and there really aren’t many things you get for free with them. The focus seems to be shifting to enterprise customers(even more so than before).

(Salesforce developer here)

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#243
post #219

No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much. Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel. This is why I don't support any platform that does not als…

I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you choose providers or clients, any recommendations?

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#244
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.

While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet.

So far we're hitting that goal.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#245
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, I wonder how Discord would pull off a shift to enterprise. A big differentiator is that Discord is more for casual conversation. By changing the current successful product, it won't stand out versus Slack/Teams. However, a fork to a separate version of Discord sounds very, very costly in terms of resources. They would need a lot of software development (when their current developers are already occupi…

> I'm not sure how Discord could make it pay off. I dunno, enterprise sales sound like a fairly straightforward payoff to me. But I kinda don’t want them to lose focus, and that would inevitably happen.

I think Google shows how non-trivial being good at enterprise sales is. It's a different mindset to become a "We never thought anyone would want to do that, but we realize it's a key feature for you, so we'll get it on the roadmap" company.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#246
post #163

People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way…

True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies): Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Sla…

Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#247
post #163

People should understand this: A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product. If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms. Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way…

>but that it will gone in the relatively short term

I've had data stored by Google and Dropbox for free for over a decade. Even Discord has stored all my messages and files for over half a decade.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

Some times I get confused at what I’m looking at with discourse. The scrolling timeline thing is super confusing . Much rather have paging.

Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination.

You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.

Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#249
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server , but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find t…

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zulip [has] better UX [than Slack] While yes I like the thread model, I don’t believe most users would agree and say Zulip UX is better.

Really? I'm surprised many people would disagree. Slack is slow, bloated, has threading as an afterthought, is really hard to navigate, and is very bad at traversing history. In Slack, if I've been away and going through channels to see what I've missed, and want to go back to something I just saw, it's impossible to find again unless I remember the channel name. In Zulip, just scroll up.

There is a massive difference in # of users of Slack vs. # of users of Zulip. Easily 2 orders of magnitude.

People literally like the UI/UX of a Slack so much more than Zulip they are willing to pay for it vs. using a complete free Zulip alternative.

I’m not trying to be negative. Just don’t let a vocal minority cause confirmation basis. People have spoken with their wallets on Slacks UI/UX.

Post reply on HN